Styles come with defaults but you can easily change them. They can save you a lot of time as they save you having to manually style every element on your document.

Styles allow you to specify what all elements of a certain type shall look like. I'll run you through setting up styles and a template which I like but I encourage you to experiment and find a style that suits your taste. On the following page we'll look at a series of things you can do to set yourself up with professional and elegant looking documents. Though a great looking document can't make up for poor content (well maybe just a bit), it definitely will amplify the appeal of good and great content. It is simple to do and will go a long way to increasing their opinion of you and your abilities. In the readers mind it reflects on the quality of the content but it will also increase their impression of you as the author. I would really encourage you to take the time to make your documents look professional. To the right is an example page to illustrate what we are going to look at creating. Whilst I will explain how to lay out the page in Google Docs there is obviously nothing stopping you applying the same ideas within your documents made using other word processors.

Thankfully it's not too difficult to create your own document styles and templates to work from which can really make your Docs stand out.

And Google does provide some templates in their template gallery for Google Docs which aren't bad but also leave a bit of room for improvement. If you're creating a presentation there are ample high quality themes to go at. Sometimes it can seem like documents created in Google Docs are doomed to mediocrity in the looks department.

Templates for google docs